Iam a 55-year-old woman from Metairie, Louisiana, who served 20 years in the United States Army from August 10, 1978 to August 31, 1998. I enlisted to become a Parachute Rigger but first I had to pass airborne school. In October 1978, during the third week of airborne training, I witnessed a parachutist fall to his death. Needless to say, I did not graduate from airborne school.

The new book Restoring the Brain: Neurofeedback as an Integrative Approach to Health is now in print. We received our initial copies from the publisher, Taylor and Francis, just in time for the July Summit. Here is the story of how this book came about. In September 2013 Hanno Kirk and Kelley Foust jointly presented “EEG Neurofeedback in the Treatment of Mental Health Disorders” at the Integrative Medicine and Mental Health conference in Chicago. It was a new topic for most of the conferees and there were many questions from the audience. One person who was impressed by the presentation was the Acquisitions Editor of the Health Division of Taylor and Francis Publishers. He contacted Hanno Kirk and asked if he would like to expand the material in the PowerPoint into a book. “Given his enthusiasm and interest I felt I couldn’t turn down such an opportunity,” Hanno related. “After consulting with Siegfried, I assembled a team of twelve writers and told Lance Wobus that I would take on the role of editor.” The book contract was signed in February 2014, and on September 2, all chapter manuscripts were delivered to the publisher.

During our trip to Dharamsala, India last September in order to conduct our training course at Men Tsee Khang, the Tibetan Medical Institute, we had the opportunity to encounter a long-term meditator who was interested in experiencing the synchrony training with Cygnet. The Venerable Thich Chi Thien had spent more than a decade in silent meditation, and during the course of those years he lost his fluency with the English language. For that reason, our communication with the Venerable was in Vietnamese with the help of Minh Chau Le, who had both inspired our journey and organized the whole adventure.

The June issue of The Atlantic Magazine features an article on brain hacking by Maria Konnikova. The article reviews various technology options that give some hope of sprucing up brain function. First of all there are the smart pills. Already the stimulants are finding use beyond their medical applications in boosting test performance among college students.

Brain Computer Interfaces (BCI) are a relatively new fascination in the neurosciences, and the payoff in research has already been significant. By tracking the activity of a small number of neurons in the motor cortex, for example, the actual movement of an arm to direct the cursor on a screen can be fairly emulated by a robot arm that receives its instructions from the tracking electronics. Scientists had to make the ‘translation’ from the neural firing streams into instructions for movement, and they were able to do so successfully based on the prior observations. This is the work of Miguel Nicolelis and his team.

In recent months we have been sensitized once again to the problem of police violence perpetrated against men in their custody. The most famous cases persist in one’s memory—Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., Eric Garner in New York, Ezell Ford in Los Angeles. And then there was also Tamir Rice, the 12-year-old shot in Cleveland. But there are the non-fatal cases as well that linger in memory: the woman kicked in the groin by a female officer while in custody; the man thrown on the ground with such force that his neck is broken. One reacts with revulsion to all these events.